Are They Rebooting The Transformers Franchise?

Look, I gave the Michael Bay Transformers franchise a very decent chance. When they first came out—in spite the deeply cliched characters, nearly incomprehensible action scenes, and thin plots—the movies featured these very quirky conspiracy/”ancient astronauts” types of elements that was at least very idiosyncratic to Bay and kind of interesting…

…but by the time I got to the fourth in the franchise, Transformers: Age Of Extinction (I did skip #3), I was DONE. It was an interminable, incomprehensible (there’s that word again, comes up a lot when talking about Bay Transformers films), LONG mess. It wasn’t even good in a “overblown trashy fun” type of way (and there are so many films I love for exactly this reason).

But I don’t think these Bay (or rather, Bay-influenced) Transformers movies are what the current audience wants—certainly not 14 more future films, which had been rumored at one point.

And that comes to recent news out of Toy Fair, that at a Hasbro Preview event the company (and this is quoted by Transformers World) “specifically stated that a new team at Paramount will reset the Transformers Live Action Movie Series.” This would happen after the Bumblebee solo movie at the end of this year. A 6th Transformers film in the series—basically, a sequel to The Last Night—has been removed from the Paramount release calendar.